Tag Archives: John Moreland

The Loneliest Roots Music Festival of 2020

This was published at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website, on my first day of self-isolation or whatever y’all want to call it. As you’ll see below, my area had 98 cases on March 13 2020, and as of today, sixty-one days later, there are 32,673 cases with 1,313 deaths. Knowing that “One day in April it will just disappear…it’ll be a miracle” was just another lie, I suspected we would all be craving live music. Putting together this video music festival was an idea behind the times, as a week or two later musicians began to livestream on social media. Now, mammoth events are taking place and people are spending a lot of time watching and hearing some great content. In any event, I still like my choices, and thought you might enjoy them as well. What do you have to lose?

As I sit in my apartment a few miles north of New York City, and only a few minutes away from what we’re now calling The Containment Area, I wait for the pandemic to land at my doorstep. In our little corner of Westchester County there are now officially 98 cases of the coronavirus reported, schools are closed, the National Guard has been dispatched, I witnessed a fight over toilet paper at the local Costco this morning, and, God help us, they’ve sold out of frozen pizza at Trader Joe’s.

With millions of people living in the tri-state area you might think that a few hundred confirmed cases doesn’t sound all that threatening, but all the public health officials are warning it’s only the beginning. The World Health Organization‘s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced that “We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction.” (The Washington Post — or #fakenews as some call it.)

While Tedros could be right, he’s probably not heard that here in America we’ve already developed an antidote to the virus. It seems that a weekend of playing golf at Mar-a-Lago and shaking hands with possibly infected ass-kissing conservative politicians and donors will make you immune to all future illness. And if for some reason that fails, we’ll be arming every doctor and nurse with automatic weapons and orders to shoot the germs on sight while we begin building walls around hospitals.

If you think I’m making light of this human tragedy, it’s only because I’m anxious and nervous, and humor is a form of relief. You see, at my age with an underlying medical condition and being a Democratic Socialist who likely conspired with the Chinese to cause this to happen, my odds of beating this virus if it lands at my doorstep aren’t all that great. And so here I am, acting like a young Brian Wilson: in my room.

Sadly, you’ve likely heard that music festivals and tours are being canceled in rapid succession. Musicians, record labels, and fans have lost money that they probably barely scraped together to attend SXSW in Austin. Marketing and launch plans have turned to dust, and the organization will not be issuing any refunds. To add insult to injury, any national economic relief plan that the DC superstars put together will exclude participants in the arts.

For almost six years up until 2016, Couch By Couchwest was a great way for musicians to share their music. Running concurrently with SXSW, the online video festival let anybody upload a clip to their site and you could tune in whenever you wanted and catch both pros and amateurs. I heard a lot of great music, made lifelong friends, and it beat the inconvenience, heat, and cost of any outdoor festival. If you guys are still out there, this would be a great time for a revival.

Lacking that effort, I’ve put together my own mini-fest of some recent (mostly) live videos for your enjoyment. Please wash your hands for 20 seconds before watching and try not to breathe. And please, stay safe.

For more information on finding sources for online concert streaming, check out this article from the San Francisco Chronicle. And for news on the financial impact the virus is having on the music industry, here’s an overview from Fortune.

Milk Carton Kids and Rose Cousins – “Wild World”

Nathaniel Rateliff – “And It’s Still Alright”

The Reckless Drifters – “Drivin’ Nails in My Coffin”

Dori Freeman – “Walls of Me and You”

The Mastersons – “Eyes Wide Open”

Honey Harper – “Tomorrow Never Comes”

Nora Jane Struthers – “Nice to Be Back Home”

Bonny Light Horseman – “Jane Jane”

John Moreland – “East October”

Tré Burt – “Caught It from the Rye”

Terry Allen & The Panhandle Mystery Band – “Abandonitis”

Charles Wesley Godwin – “Coal Country”

Courtney Barnett – “So Long, Marianne”

This was originally published at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

John Moreland: Appreciation and Anticipation

Photo from John Moreland’s Website.

In addition to writing a weekly column for No Depression‘s website, I also aggregate flotsam and jetsam from multiple sources that I post throughout each day on the Facebook page Americana and Roots Music Daily as a non-commercial service to share with fans of the music that falls into that ‘big tent’ descriptor. Some people like to collect coins or stamps, follow a sports team, donate their free time to helping others, or perhaps travel to faraway places seeking thrill and adventure. But I suppose if I had to define my hobby, it’s a never-ending search for music that I’ve yet to experience, staying on top of current news, and digging around the past.

An unintended consequence of this social media experience is that the roughly 3,000 people who have chosen to follow the page have created an interactive community of people who freely share their own thoughts, news, and commentary. In addition to making new friends and connecting with old ones, the greatest gift I get in return is learning things I did not know. An example of this occurred recently when I posted what I’d describe as basically a press release masquerading as a news article that announced Tulsa-based singer and songwriter John Moreland was planning to release a new album in February and will be going out on tour. (I bought my ticket for March 27 in Brooklyn.)

My first awareness of Moreland was his 2013 album In the Throes, and I’ve always considered him to be one of those absolutely amazing performers who exists in the shadows of endless Americana and folk music releases, a treasured secret of mine with a small but rabid fanbase. Nice to be wrong. Hundreds of people reacted to that Facebook post expressing their love of Moreland’s music and anticipation of the new music. He has already released a song from the album, called “East October,” on the various streaming sites.

Like many others participating in the current paradigm of creating, producing, and distributing music, Moreland has always taken the wheel with his career. In a recent interview with The Seventh Hex, he talks about the need for being hands-on:

“I still do as much as I can with regards to taking a DIY approach with my musical career, but I can’t really book my own tours anymore. Also, I used to do all of my own merch mail orders and I don’t do that anymore because I can’t keep up with it. Then again, I still record demos at home and my wife sells a lot of my tour posters on her online store so we run that out of our house together. I guess it’s always good to make stuff in my own way and to know that I can get out there and do stuff however I want to.”

That song is titled “You Don’t Care Enough for Me to Cry,” and it’s on the 2015 album High on Tulsa Heat. Appearing on the podcast Americana Music Show, he expanded on how the album was self-produced and fan funded.

“I did my last record myself too. I produced and engineered that one. I did that one more out of necessity. It’s what had to be done. But this time I was sorta stressing out about what studio to go to if I wanted to find a producer. Just make plans about how I was going to make the record. Kind of on a whim I just got a couple of friends together and we made the record ourselves. My parents were going out of town for a couple of week so we kind of took over their house and turned it into a studio and recorded for a few days. On less than a day’s notice we came in and did that. But I like doing it that way. Just getting some buddies together and pooling together all our gear. And you go, OK, here’s what we have, how do you make something cool with this stuff. And it gives you a direction to go in.”

The new album for February 2020 is titled LP5. It was recorded in Texas with Centro-matic’s Matt Pence producing and playing drums, and with other contributors including Bonnie Whitmore, Will Johnson, and multi-instrumentalist and longtime Moreland collaborator John Calvin Abney.

In many of the interviews he’s done over the years, Moreland talks about spending his teens playing with punk and hardcore bands — until he heard Steve Earle. It’s hard to not hear Earle’s influence (and I think there’s some Springsteen in there as well) on Moreland’s songwriting, and in the vocals as well. From the Americana Music Show podcast:

“I was probably 19 or so and I vaguely knew who Steve Earle was. I knew ‘Copperhead Road’ and ‘Guitar Town’ and stuff. But I heard one of his newer records that had just come out, The Revolution Starts Now, and it blew me away and I got my hands on everything of his I could find. That was kind of eye-opening. I realized that I had always been in bands and I realized that I had always been the guy that wrote the songs, kind of just by default. It was like, ‘We’re a band, we need some stuff to play, so I’ll make something up.’ Steve Earle opened my eyes to this whole different kind of songwriting where you could say something with it. So that led me to songwriters like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and Rodney Crowell. I’d just get on the internet and do all the research I could. So that’s what led me here I guess.”

Moreland is married to Canadian visual artist Pearl Rachinsky, who you should search out because she does really exquisite work (she handled the album artwork for Big Bad Luv). They met several years ago at a Folk Alliance confab in Kansas City, which he describes in part as “a lot of white dudes in suspenders.” They live in Tucson, Arizona.

Moreland is not very active on social media; his Facebook and Twitter accounts are primarily used for announcing upcoming gigs. But I thought I’d check in before finishing this column just in case something new popped up. Sure enough, on Oct. 27 he tweeted:

“To the guy in Macon who told my wife he was gonna ‘slap the shit out of the bitch who broke my heart’ please don’t slap any women, and please don’t come to my shows anymore you redneck piece of shit.”

I love this guy.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Make Americana Great Again: Why We Cherish Those Amazing Polls

That is one helluva picture. You might recall that it surfaced this past June after Neil Young demanded that Donald Trump stop using “Rockin’ in the Free World” at his campaign events. Utilizing his standard and preferred method of statesmanship, Trump went on the morning news shows, called Young a bad name, and then tweeted this: “A few months ago Neil Young came to my office looking for $$$ on an audio deal and called me last week to go to his concert. Wow!”

Young, no slouch himself when it comes to using social media, seemed to confirm Trump’s assertion of capitalistic hypocrisy when he wrote on Facebook: “It was a photograph taken during a meeting when I was trying to raise funds for Pono, my online high resolution music service.”

That Neil Young would choose Trump to get cozy with as a potential partner is enough to cause the price of flannel futures to tumble. Besides, in the past several months, Young’s digital entree has entered and floundered into the ether of a disinterested marketplace.

Pushing that particular random thought-bubble aside, it’s time to talk about the annual readers and critics polls that focus on one type of music or another. These are soon to occupy much of our collective time and space via traditional and social media, using the skill sets and wisdom of random cubes tossed together in a Yahtzee cup and spilt onto the countertop. Can we all agree that this excercise produces an inaccurate and imperfect list of superlatives? At the very least, I hope it will open up new avenues of exploration for some folks, as well as simply serving to bolster our own opinions based on an album’s popularity.

It is the former that most excites me because, with well over 120,000 new albums being released each year, there is no possible way to see all, know all, or hear all. It’s the depth and diversity of new music that makes scanning these polls so much fun. Nothing beats discovering something that slipped through the cracks.

In late October, the editor of No Depression:The Roots Music Authority requested a list of my favorite titles (I think she used the word “best”), and this is the list I sent her:

Jason Isbell, Daniel Romano, John Moreland, Pharis and Jason Romero, Tom Brosseau, Noah Gundersen, Watkins Family Hour, Joan Shelley, Milk Carton Kids, and an exceptional concert compilation called Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of a Dreadful Film. (Note to self: Going forward, try to be nicer.)

I’m sure y’all can spot the problem. It was way too exclusive. Narrowing my favorite albums of the year down to ten is just plain silly.

I also would have loved to include releases from Calexico, Jessica Pratt, the Westies, Kristin Andreassen, Joe Pug, Shakey Graves, Sufjan Stevens, The Kennedys, Kepi Ghoulie, Leon Bridges, Meg Baird, the Lonesome Trio, the Deslondes, Frazey Ford, the Skylarks, Kacey Musgraves, Ana Egge, Darrell Scott, Nikki Talley, Lindi Ortega, Dave Rawlings Machine, Jill Andrews, Darlingside, Decemberists, Daniel Martin Moore, Susie Glaze and the Hilonesome Band, and my friends Spuyten Duyvil.

I really like the duos and duets too. Seth Avett and Jessica Lea Mayfield, Anna and Elizabeth, the Lowest Pair, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell. Not to mention the Honey Dewdrops, Iron and Wine and Ben Bridwell, Dave and Phil Alvin, and both the Wainwright and Chapin Sisters.

Don’t forget compilations with really long names that may or may not have been released this year, that I’ve been enjoying regardless: Arkansas at 78 RPM: Corn Dodgers & Hoss Hair Pullers, The Brighter Side: A 25th Anniversary Tribute to Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression, Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs By Karen Dalton, and Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music On the Mason-Dixon Line.

And then there are the names you already know: Iris Dement, Elvis Costello, Los Lobos, Leonard Cohen, Jesse Winchester, Dwight Yoakam, Mark Knopfler, Fairport Convention, and Bob Dylan (the old new stuff, not the new old stuff).

I haven’t counted them up, but this longer list of mine can’t be more than 50 or 60 albums — a pitiful, sickly and puny little list. Seriously, I’m ashamed. There are at least 119,940 or more to choose from and I know that you can do better than me. Whether you participate in the No Depression poll or any of the thousands of others that lurk out there, relax and enjoy. Have fun, don’t stress, don’t argue. It’s all about exploration.

Postscript: For the record, Americana is a radio format and an association, not a genre.

Maybe You’re Listening To The Wrong Music

Photo by Loubos Houska / Creative Commons 1.0

Do you think you might be suffering from the boogie woogie flu? It’s an affliction that causes you to become totally bored with your record collection or digital library, much of which is populated with either new music or old favorites. It happens to me sometimes. The best medicine is often digging deeper.

If I’m driving down the road and a track pops up from The Okeh Blues Story 1949-1957 collection, my toes start to tap and my heart skips a beat. The Complete King Recordings of Wade Manier makes me pull my banjo off the wall for some two-finger pickin’. If you haven’t lately listened to the Cotton Top Mountain Sanctified Singers or Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters or Fruit Jar Guzzlers, run out now and get yourself Yazoo’s Times Ain’t What They Used to Be. There’s something about those old dusty 78s.

Last week I was in the car and I tried to get my mojo back by twirling the dial up and down the FM band looking for inspiration. Of course “twirl” is a euphemism for pressing buttons on a digital readout, and “inspiration” was perhaps too much to hope for. But with millions of people from every nook and cranny in this whole wide world living in the city of New York, I knew I’d find something to whet the whistle.

What I found was a small station broadcasting from New Rochelle, a suburb not far from Queens and the Bronx. It caught my ear with Caribbean music, blasting in a style that blended old school rhythm and blues, a reggae back beat, hip-hop, dancehall, and toasting. Weird electronic sounds, songs shifting effortlessly in and out of each other, and a steady commentary in a thick Jamaican accent that made it impossible to know if it was part of the music, an informercial, or a news flash. I think it might have been all three.

WVIP-FM is owned by David ‘Squeeze’ Annakie’s Linkup Media Group, and some of the other businesses they own and advertise almost continually on the station include JAMROCK Magazine, Saige Skin Care, SqueezeCard, AAA Service Protection, BioLife Energy Systems Solutions, Vitaways, Value Health Network, USA Credit Repair, Fiction (a Jamaican club), and Immigration Link. Squeeze takes to the air himself and promotes like Reverend Ike on speed. And, as a special bonus to the island music (between all the ads), there is the option for anybody to buy a 30-minute block of time for their own show. I’m considering it.

While my reggae vocabulary mostly consists of Bob Marley and that “Bad Boy” theme song from COPS, I have to tell you that whatever the hell this station is playing, I want more of it. Although not Americana nor alt-anything I know about, it’s roots music of the stems and seeds variety. Ain’t no such thing as wrong music.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Americana and Roots Music Videos: Spring 2015

Pixabay License

We’re somewhere around a third of the way into this year and I thought it was a good time to flip through the bin and share some of my favorite albums and songs with you. Frankly, I’m doing this much more for me than for you. I’ve acquired so much new stuff lately, and with barely enough time to listen, it’s going to force me to work a bit. But a night or two of just listening to music? Pretty nice job if you can get it.

I visit YouTube several times a day, every day … and sharing videos has become an important tool in discovering archival footage, catching up on old favorites, and exposing new music. Here’s a few things that caught my eyes and ears this season.

The Westies

John Ellis posted a review on No Depression for The Westies back in February, and he said that they “make music that demonstrates how closely related inner city grit and grime is with the softness of a serene Appalachian mountaintop. Americana doesn’t just belong in rural settings; West Side Stories is Americana music embedded in the rivets of Rust Belt cities with connections to Ireland, coal-streaked miners, and dirt under their fingernails sharecroppers.” Great description. This is the track that does it for me.

Seth Avett and Jessica Lea Mayfield

I seem to have missed their mini-tour last March, but Seth Avett and Jessica Lea Mayfield’s tribute to Elliott Smith presents twelve perfect songs that are handled with care and sprinkled with wonder. I haven’t read much about this project. It’s one that could have easily slipped past you.

Pharis and Jason Romero

I don’t think there’s anybody who has heard Pharis and Jason Romero’s music and failed to fall in love with their harmonies and songs. They’ve got such a great story, and A Wanderer I’ll Stay is probably the strongest of their albums so far. If we could only get them out of Canada and down south, life would be a dream.

Fairport Convention

While Fairport Convention may no longer have the same rabid fan base in America that they still maintain in England, they still make intensely magical music, as demonstrated by the title track of their latest album, Myths and Heroes. The annual Cropready concerts will commence in August.

Calexico

Just about every track on Calexico’s Edge of the Sun has a different guest on it. The first invitation to collaborate went to Sam Beam from Iron and Wine, and then they extended it to Ben Bridwell from Band of Horses, Nick Urata from Devotchka, Carla Morrison, Gaby Moreno, Amparo Sanchez, multi-instrumentalists from the Greek band Takim, as well as Neko Case. I wish we still had Top 40 AM radio because this one would be number one with a bullet.

John Moreland

John Moreland is the most dazzling singer, guitarist and songwriter in America. He’s a very big man. And I think I know why. Deep inside his soul lives Woody Guthrie, a young Bob Dylan, a kid from the Jersey shore named Bruce, and the hardcore troubadour Steve Earle. He’s that f-ing great. And you know what? I first discovered him on YouTube.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Americana and Roots Music Videos: Winter 2015

Pixabay License

Surfing in the digital stream and scouring YouTube for new music, old tunes and whatever I can find of interest. Here’s a few things that caught my eyes and ears this season.

I’d like to kick it off with the trailer for The Winding Stream, a great film first presented at SXSW. Subtitled ‘The Carters, The Cashes and The Course of Country Music’. Catch it if you can.

Jordie Lane and The Stray Birds

Two of my favorite artists, Jordie Lane from Australia and the US string band trio Stray Birds have recently come together and performed ‘Black Diamond’ for the Folk Alley Sessions. Both acts will have their own showcases in KC.

John Moreland

Before I leave this planet, I will one day see the great Oklahoma folksinger John Moreland. Performing since the early 2000’s, he came out of the punk and hardcore scene while in high school, and over the years he has matured into a great songwriter and captivating artist.

I Draw Slow

This bluegrass band made it on my list of favorite bands from last year, and this clip from last summer is why.

Dom Flemons

This seems to be the year that folks that formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops are stepping out on their own and breaking through to a wider audience.

The HillBenders

The HillBenders have announced that their new album will be a complete bluegrass tribute to the The Who’s Tommy album. This is a teaser they just posted.

Ian and Sylvia 1986